The nationally-syndicated columnist for the Chicago Daily News, Sydney J.
Harris, titled a recurring feature, “Things I
Learned En Route to Looking Up Other Things.”
The burgeoning internet provides everyone with this opportunity on a
daily basis. Use of any of the search engines brings up a long
list of hits related to the parameters indicated. Some are
exactly on target; others are closely related, and eventually one
contends with items of marginal interest.

I bring this up because a search of my own name has brought surprising
results. I am pleased that my interviews have been quoted and
cited in places large and small — from The New York Times and Opera News to blogs and school
reports — but nothing prepared me for a full
interview in audio format showing up on YouTube!

I try very hard to control the use of my material, and numerous
requests for copies are mostly turned down. I sometimes allow
researchers to explore a specific guest, but even then I impose
restrictions as to use and deny any further copying or
distribution. I have always, however, gladly made duplicates of
the conversations upon request of the guest or their family. This
was the case with composer David Diamond.

We first spoke on the phone in 1986. I subsequently used material
from that interview on WNIB later that year and in mid-1990. Then
in the fall of 1990, Diamond was in Chicago to attend
performances of his Symphony #5
by the Chicago Symphony conducted by Michael Morgan. He was most
gracious to see me for an in-person conversation at his hotel during
the visit. We spoke for about forty-five minutes and after we
were finished he asked to have a copy of the chat. A few days
later I duplicated the cassette and sent it off, just as I had done on
numerous occasions with other guests. Other than being pleased
that he asked, I thought nothing more of it.

I used some of the material from this fresh conversation twice on three
different outlets — WNIB, WNUR, and Contemporary Classical
Internet Radio. I had also planned to have it transcribed for
inclusion in this website series, but before that happened, I made my
discovery. Fortunately, the presentation seems to be clear and
intact, with no additions or alterations. Full credit is given to
me and its original purpose, so in the end I am pleased that it is there
— perhaps like singers who find pirated recordings of their own
performances!

Now I have transcribed and slightly edited the interview —
as I do with all my presentations — and have posted it as
part of my ongoing series on this website. As you will see, my
guest was forthright and open with his opinions. Though not
jovial, I sensed a slight playfulness in some of his responses, and
indeed his postcard to me after receiving the tape showed this slightly
sardonic side.

Here is what transpired that afternoon . . . . .

Bruce Duffie: It
seems that for quite a number of years
your symphonies were languishing, and now they have emerged again with
ever increased vigor. Does this give you a special sense of joy
to have the symphonies and other music come back again?

David Diamond: I’ll
answer the first part of your
statement. They never languished. That seems to be part of
a mythology that started I don’t know how. I think what happened
was that I
languished. I disappeared from the United States of America at a
time that it was very, very difficult to live here — called
the McCarthy
Period — and I went to Italy to live.
Naturally, the moment
you move away you leave things in the hands of your publisher.
The music was always there, available to conductors if they wanted
it. While I was away all those years
that they say the music languished, if they only would
do their homework these people who set up this story
would realize that Mr. Bernstein gave premieres of three symphonies.

BD: There
were always a few
performances, but it seems now there’s a much bigger resurgence, or is
that just perception?

DD: I think
it’s the recording that has done that. Mr.
Schwarz is the one who is playing the music like mad, but I haven’t
seen Mr. Slatkin or anybody else
jump in and go along. [See my Interviews with
Leonard Slatkin.] The recording has been out since July, and
the
publisher says there have been inquiries, but I can’t say that there
is any improvement in the so-called interest. What is different
is that they’re all younger conductors today — some
whom I had as
students in my classes at the Juilliard School — who
haven’t shown the
slightest interest. They said they would when they got orchestras
of their own, but people
like Andrew Litton, who is at Bournemouth and was in Washington as
assistant to Rostropovich hasn’t played a note of mine
yet. So you see, there’s the problem.

BD: Is there
anything you can do — or should do — to
get your music even more widely performed?

DD: There are
young composers today who’ve
made a career of promoting their own music. They do nothing but
go from city to city and peddle their scores. I’m too old for
that; at seventy-five you can’t do that. I’m glad
that I can just get my teaching done. I live in Rochester so
I have to commute to New York once a week. I wake up five o’clock
in
the morning to make a flight going in, and take a flight coming back at
five. So it’s not easy. But there are young composers who
do it,
and if they enjoy doing it, well let them do it. All power to
them if they think that conductors will do it that way, but I know that
conductors have told me they can’t stand these young composers coming
around and annoying them. They always say, “Why don’t they send
their tapes and scores?” But the young composers say, “The
conductors won’t listen to them.” I advise my own students not to
do that. They should simply send their scores with tapes
— if the works are very, very, good. For example, I
have a
brilliant doctoral student who graduated from Juilliard last year named
Lowell Liebermann. [See my Interview with
Lowell Liebermann.] He is getting along very well. I
thought his First Symphony,
which he had written with me as his
doctoral program, was so fine, and he was only then twenty-five.
He had studied with me when he was eighteen and then came into the
school as a regular student. Lowell sent the score to
Schwarz at my suggestion. Schwarz listened to the tape of the
reading and performance at Julliard and said, “My God, this is a
wonderful work.” He then performed it with Seattle Symphony
and commissioned a work for his New York
Chamber Symphony from him. So you see, there are ways of it
happening.

BD: But of
course, Mr. Liebermann had a
little bit of extra push with the name of Mr. Diamond attached to it.

DD:
Maybe. I don’t know. But other young composers have people
who could
promote them and encourage them, too.

BD: Now this
young man obviously is an outstanding example. You don’t need to
give me a list of names, but are there
others who are on that level coming along?

DD: Yes, strangely
enough they’re my students and
everybody can’t get over that. They’re the ones that are really
making the big thing in America. There is Daron Hagen, who has
been performed now by major orchestras including the Philadelphia
Orchestra as a
matter of fact, and there are many, many more.

BD: What is
it about your teaching
that makes a composition student ready to really produce a worthwhile
work?

DD: I do what
those university-based teachers don’t do — I
give them a
thorough, traditional training. They have to really prove to me
that they can do everything in traditional harmony, chorale
harmonization, contrapuntal florid counterpoint, fugal writing and
orchestration — but real orchestration, not the
silly ways they teach
orchestration at universities.

BD: What’s a
silly way?

DD: The silly
way is assign them a short Schumann
piece from the Album for the Young,
or a movement from a Beethoven
sonata and say, “Orchestrate it for chamber orchestra, or for large
orchestra.”

BD: Then what
is the correct way?

DD: The
correct way is to simply give them an
assignment like, “Take the opening of your idea for what you think will
be a sinfonietta or any short orchestral piece, and show me how you
will go about orchestrating a piece. How do you begin? What
do you begin with? Do you make a sketch first? Do you have
a piano version?” If they show me that they have made a version
for the piano, I say, “That’s wrong. It can’t be for the
keyboard because you’re fishing from notes from the keyboard.
You’re not hearing it your head, and you’re not hearing it in terms of
the orchestra.”

BD: It seems
that instead of
giving them a pattern and letting them make the clothes, you’re asking
them to design their own pattern as well as tailor the clothing.

DD: I show
them how Strauss made his sketches before orchestrating — three
lines, four lines. I show them Debussy’s
sketch for La Mer which is in
the library in
Rochester. I show them Debussy’s arrangement on three lines, not
on piano,
indicating in colored pencil this is the harp, this is the horn,
this is the first and second violins.

BD: But is
this something that they can
do before they’ve really developed their inner ear?

DD: Oh well,
the orchestration comes after they’ve
mastered the elementary techniques of composition. Orchestration
is something that evolves after
you’ve studied counterpoint and harmony and chorale harmonization
and figured bass and all that.

BD: Would
someone with a
limited capacity for hearing things in their ear be better off doing
things at the piano? Would that help them at all?

DD: No.
They still would not be hearing what
they hear in their inner ear in terms of the orchestra. They
would be hearing it chordally as piano music. How can you
possibly play on the piano what you might be
thinking of a three-part fugal section in the middle of a
symphony? Just try to manipulate that. They get chords but
they don’t hear
lines. How do they know the first violins are going to come
in there, the violas here, the piccolos up there? They’re
thinking only of this and it’s totally the wrong way. Now
Stravinsky used to work at the piano, but he had his
sketches. He had a special, extraordinary accoutrement on the
piano. He had a big board with attachments and things to line up
staffs, to make his sketches.

BD: I assume
that this way you’re encouraging
your students to work is the way you have worked all your life?

DD: All my
life, probably because I was trained as a
violinist and piano was secondary. Violinists or other instrument
players, if they’re composers they usually work that way.
Pianists, I think, in our time have the worst compositional techniques,
because they don’t hear linearly.

BD: Even for
piano?

DD: Oh no,
for piano they’re fine. But writing for the orchestra they have
no
conception. They write piano music, which they then have to
arrange for orchestra.

BD: If you
find someone who is so attached to
the piano, do you encourage that person to just write piano music?

DD: If I
think that they have a bigger potential and
that they can write for orchestra, too — if
they’ve shown me in some
little exercise I asked them to do that there is a technique there
— then I encourage them to write for the orchestra.
What’s the point of writing piano sonatas if you
really don’t have a good enough technique, anyway? How can you
write a fugue for the piano
if you don’t have enough counterpoint?

BD: Of
course, Hindemith took that to the extreme and learned every instrument
before he would
begin to write.

DD: That is
right. There you are!

BD: Is that
the right way to do it?

DD: The right
way to do it is his way because he
made sketches like crazy and sometimes orchestrated right into the
score. He didn’t even have preliminary [orchestration]
sketches. He would
write a whole symphony. His Symphony
for Band was written that
way — right into score.

BD: The ideas
come right out onto the
page in fifteen or twenty lines?

DD: Right.

BD: Have you
written anything for band?

DD: I just
finished one last year. That’s very
strange... The man who just called me a few minutes ago, Jack Stamp,
arranged where several university bands commission a work. It’s a
piece I call Tantivy, based
on
[sings] “di da di, di da da, di da da,” the hunting call. It
turned out very well and it’s been played
by almost all of the people who commissioned it. It’s
already recorded by the University of Cincinnati Band, but there’s
going to be a commercial one released with Frederick Frenell.
[See my Interview
with Frederick Fennell.] Then there’s another one called Hearts Music, which will go along
very
nicely with that piece.

BD: Is the
technique really at all different writing
for band?

DD: Very
different. You have no strings for supporting
harmony. You don’t have any kind of color that resembles the
string section, so you have to completely invent a way of getting that
lyric quality which the band can produce if you know how to write for
the high winds, particularly the clarinets, flutes, oboes. So
there is enough possibility.

BD: Would you
raise violent objections, then, if
someone took one of your orchestral works and tried to arrange it
for band?

DD: Couldn’t
be done.

BD: [With a
gentle nudge] Oh, someone could make it work.

DD: They’ve
tried and they can’t because the music is so
contrapuntal. For example, the Fifth
Symphony that’s being done
here would be impossible to arrange for band because of the
big fugue that ends it. It also has a huge organ climax which is
not available to
the band. [Both laugh]

BD: [With a
wink] Maybe add a calliope?

DD: Maybe...

BD: Well, when
you’re working on a piece of
music, do you know before you start that it’s going to be an orchestra
work or a chamber work or a piano work or a band work?

DD: Oh,
yes. Sure. If it’s not an
out-and-out commission piece, you always have a conception that you
hear. You always know what it is you’re going
to write.

BD: When you
start making your sketches, do you know
where it’s going to end up or are you ever surprised where it goes?

DD: Oh, I’m
often surprised! Yes. It
never ends up where I think, not even in the tonality.

BD: Are these
good surprises?

DD: Oh yes, I
think so. But sometimes I change
them because they don’t work out in terms of equilibrium. I may
have a total surprise in the key that I end up in, or in the kind
of fast ending when I’d planned a slow ending. This symphony
that they’re doing here I originally had imagined as having a fast last
movement. Instead, it ends with one solo cello playing all by his
little self.

BD:
So when you’re working on
these sketches, are you always controlling that pencil or are there
times when that pencil really leads your hand?

DD: I don’t
know where it comes from, except what my
sketch books have down as the material. But what makes one note
follow the other is something that has never been able to be explained
by anyone. You can explain any other field of art, but not the
art of music. There is the subliminal life that creates abstract
notes which have absolutely no meaning whatsoever as pitches or even
a series of notes. If somebody hadn’t told you we had that
horrendous war and somebody hadn’t put ‘victory’ for [sings]
da-da-da-dum, you wouldn’t
know that this means that. Somebody said that’s ‘V
for
victory’, and that’s Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
That’s supposed to represent victory, and that’s that. But music
can’t tell us that, so it’s a completely abstract art unless you have a
program and you need a book to tell you the plot. I defy anybody
to really listen to The Sorcerer’s
Apprentice and know what that’s
about if you hadn’t known what the story line is.

BD: Then is
it a mistake that we all
come with our conceptions of Mickey Mouse and the dancing brooms?

DD: Oh, no,
no. If you’ve seen Fantasia
and all the
other things, that’s fine. That’s what you can do in illustrating
music.

BD: I’m
trying to figure out which comes
first, then — the scene in the composer’s mind,
or the notes that create
the scene?

DD: If it’s
program music, like my Romeo and
Juliette
music or my music for The Tempest,
you have a play. You are
asked to write incidental music. You have character. You
are inspired by these wonderful plays and so ideas come a little
easier there. Or if you write an opera, you have words.

BD: Of
course, there’s the text and a scenario.

DD: So you
have much more to work with, too.

BD: If you’re
writing a piece and it starts to
sort of sound like something, do you continue with making it sound more
like that, or do you let it go itself?

DD: If you’re
any kind of artist, you
know that things can go on just so long and then you need what is
called contrast. Above all in music, if you don’t have contrast,
then you have boredom. That’s the trouble with a great deal
of what they call minimalist music today. I can’t sit through
more than three minutes of Philip Glass because I begin getting hives .
. . and the same for John Adams’ Nixon
in China. I thought
if he doesn’t stop going up and down the scales and get started, then
I’ll have to get out. And indeed, I had to walk out after a
while.

BD: And yet
it fascinates so many people.

DD: I
don’t think it fascinates them. I think it is just that they’re
told that’s what the new
music is. Actually, music-goers — unless
they are, let’s
say, highly cultivated music listeners — will do
what they’re supposed
to do. I look around often to see what audiences are like, and I
can tell pretty well by the way they react to music. I remember
the moment they began listening to a John Adams piece that was very
noisy and very fast, five of them flew out. I thought, “Well,
this is a John Adams piece that was more
interesting than all those scales that he wrote.”
It was fast and furious and the name is
funny — Fast Ride in a Small Car,
or something like that. [Both laugh] [Note: The correct
title is Short Ride in a Fast Machine.]
Before it was over, I thought, “Well all
right, if you want.” But there are certain kinds of young
composers today who write gimmick pieces and then they turn to
something else. But that’s something the latter twenty-five years
of our particular century has produced, which I find very
sad.

BD: It’s like
just putting on the latest fashions
from Paris or Milan.

DD: It’s
commercialism, yes. They’re promoters. They work in a
commercial world with a
recording company, and the recording companies tell them what to
do. They found that this is a way of making a lot of money,
and it’s very easy music to write. You repeat twenty-four
bars. The copyist makes a lot of money, but really they don’t
write that many notes
that change too often.

BD: When
you’re listening to an Adams piece, I wonder if you’re not
instinctively thinking,
“I could make it go here, and we could do this, and this would be
fine,” and then you find that it’s stalled in the
one place.

DD: No.
I never react to that. Every time
I hear music of that type, particularly Glass... Not Steve
Reich. He’s the
one that interests me the most because I find there’s a big, deep
humanity. [See my Interviews
with Steve Reich.] For example, there’s a piece he wrote
called Tehillim which is
an extraordinary work! But with Adams and Glass, the musical
materials are so dull that it doesn’t matter one way or
another. I feel, “Gee, it’s strange that
that’s what they
want to do, and that’s sufficient for them.”BD: I’ve
often wondered if perhaps it’s a reaction to the
extreme compression of music in the fifties and sixties and
seventies. Music became so dense that it was like one of these
super novas that implodes on itself and then has to explode and begin
again with
nothing.

DD: That
could be, but why didn’t they realize
that when they were writing that kind of music? I used to tell
them. I wrote articles and I would give lectures, and they would
hate me for it and would sometimes boo me in public when I would be
speaking about this. I would always say, “Why are they doing
this? Don’t they know they are alienating an entire
public? Don’t they know that human beings need spiritual values
in music, that they are not interested in fun and games?” Maybe
it’s I who lack humor. I can’t even stand Peter
Schickele. [See my Interview with Peter
Schickele.] Some people love that. Some people like
going to see Charles Ludlum plays, or men playing drag queens
— a man as
Camille — or those who went to Carnegie Hall to
hear a woman
named Anna Russell, a pathetic creature who couldn’t sing
anymore. They would go and adore and yell “Bravo” at this
poor unfortunate woman that was terrible. Why do people like to
do
that? To me that’s a kind of humiliation of a woman who may once
have sung very well. But when you get Carnegie Hall full with a
bunch
of these crazy, crazy people at that time when she sang...
Believe me,
New York City had the weirdest people from downtown who came uptown to
just attend her concerts. But then, as I say, I may be the
culprit. I am not humorless. I find some things quite
funny, but I think when we live in times that are tragic enough,
humiliation
is not the way to use humor. Humor should
be used to be constructive, like Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca and things
like that.

DD: Oh,
yes! It’s all coming—young, the very ones
that were once young now. Even John Adams, somebody told me, has
just recorded a work of mine that I wrote way back in ‘38, my Elegy in
Memory of Ravel which he’s done in a string version on a record
of American string music. I was surprised, because I thought
for sure he knows [laughs] how badly I think of all of his music.
I
like earlier pieces of his, like the Harmonielehre
and things like
that, but when he began going up and down the scales, that was just a
little too much.

BD: Well,
have we essentially lost twenty-five or
thirty years of musical composition?

DD: That is
one of the most tragic things that has
happened in music, and in Europe it has not stopped. They’re
still losing all that, because there, music—all art—is subsidized by
governments. So you have Mr. Stockhausen still knocking
everybody’s heads off with so much sound, they go mad. None of
his works of the past have gone into the repertoire. You know,
when a composer has been around as long as Stockhausen, and not three
pieces, not even the piano pieces, are taken up by anyone and played
again, it’s a rather sad commentary.

BD: Well, how
do you account, then, for the fact that
he does draw at least some audiences?

DD: Well,
look at the audiences. They’re the
same ones who follow the Polish Festival of New Music. Look at
John Cage, for example. [See my Interview with John Cage.]
It’s a faddist thing in Europe
because the money is there to promote it. Why did Elliott Carter
have to go to Europe to make his name? [See my Interview with Elliott
Carter.] He made his name there
because there was no money to support what he was trying to do with his
music. But Elliott announced to everybody that he did
not want a public. At the time of his first quartet he said, “I
don’t care
whether a public likes it or not. I’m writing this for
myself.” We are old friends from way back, Carter and I, and
we’ve discussed it. He knows
that he’s made a big mistake somewhere, and his music is little by
little coming back to more traditional values.

BD: Is it
like society that it is coming little by little back to traditional
values?

DD: That
society is doing this worries me a
little. It’s doing it in the horrible way I found in the fifties,
which is it’s getting a rightist, bigot slant, and it worries me.

BD: Are we
going to get a new McCarthy coming
in?

DD: If there
is, I don’t think anybody’s going to
allow him to exist because we so-called ‘leftists’ — as
they call
us — are still around, and there are many more
and they haven’t died out. We will make life very unhappy for
them. Even around here, remember this
Skokie business that happened not too long ago? I hear a new
Yiddish
National Theater is giving a series of performances there. Could
that have happened when those skinheads and all the other
monsters were out?

BD: In a way,
it’s sort of ironic that
one of the great classical writers of tonal music should be such a
leftist and label himself a leftist. For some reason it doesn’t
seem to add up, and yet it makes a perfect harmony within you.

DD: That’s
exactly what a good socialist-minded composer should
be. He should think in terms of human beings. Beethoven
did, Mozart and Haydn did. Bach certainly did — he
wrote
directly for human beings. What happened with my
generation and the older generation, when we began we were writing for
human beings. We had good teachers. Aaron Copland was
writing wonderful, advanced music, but it was all music for human
beings. El Salón
Mexíco showed his experiences in Mexico. Think of
Leonard Bernstein and his Kaddish
Symphony or Jeremiah
Symphony, bless his soul. Today we don’t have great souls
in the
young composers — except my students.
[Both laugh] No, I exaggerate, naturally.

BD: Perhaps
you find the great souls in
the students who come to you, and you bring that out.

DD:
Yes. I’ve also met some other
wonderful, wonderful young people. There are some right here in
Chicago who came to a couple of rehearsals. They seem very
interesting. I wish I had had a little more time to talk with
them, but they seemed to know a lot about my music. They had been
listening to the new Schwarz recording, the first that will come out
of my symphonies, and they were most interested in my music.
That’s
a good sign.

*
* *
* *

BD: Let me
ask the other philosophical question. What is the purpose of
music in society?

DD: To give
human beings spiritual values which will
help make life more supportful. Otherwise, life can be an agony
on earth — one agony, one minute after
another. Why do you have
so many stations playing Baroque music and religious music? I
turned the station on you have here and it’s mostly, I would say,
Baroque, although I heard two of my pieces on today, and a couple of
other contemporary works. But why is there such a need for people
to hear Baroque music as much as they do? Why do they like it so
much? Why do they listen to so much Romantic music? Even if
they’re lay listeners, there is a fulfillment emotionally. Why do
they like Jerome Kern’s songs? Why do they like George Gershwin’s
songs or Steve Sondheim or Bernstein’s — whether
it’s his more
serious music or Candide or West Side Story? These
are men who have given music that communicates. I won’t even use
the word accessibility, but communication which is on a deeper, more
profound level that every human being on this earth can understand and
appreciate and be moved by. That’s the main thing — emotionally
moved by.

BD: Now when
you say, “every human being on the
earth,” I assume you’re acknowledging a basic
understanding of the Western Musical Language?

DD: No!
Hundreds of people everywhere all over the world who sing in choruses
on Christmas Eve when they
sing Messiah or Israel in Egypt or Elijah of Mendelssohn — those
are
the people that I’m talking about. They’re not trained musicians.

BD: No, no,
no, but are you
leaving out the cultures of India and Asia?

DD: On the
contrary! I think by now we know
their music very well. Thank heavens the immigration has
changed. When I was a child, Italians came in mainly as
immigrants. My parents, Russian Jews, and all the others came at
the beginning of the century. Now it’s that wonderful influx,
and they’ve changed our culture so much for the better because
they’ve introduced the feeling of patience into life. It’s a joy
to go to an Oriental restaurant — whether it’s
Asian, Indian or Chinese — because of the
feeling. You get away from the monstrosity
of our Caucasian, nasty, rude behavior of waiters that you get almost
everywhere. With the Orientals, it’s politeness from beginning to
end. They’re on a much different spiritual level than
we are.

BD: Has your
music been played in India and
Asia?

DD: That I
don’t know. I know that years ago in Shanghai my First Symphony,
Second, Third, Fourth were performed.
Szigeti used to
play my Sonata when he
traveled abroad to Japan.

BD: I just
wondered what the reaction of non-western
audiences was.

DD: Very
interesting. I went once when Szigeti
did the Sonata in Hong Kong,
and I must say it was almost the reaction
of a Western audience. Even more, I would say, much more because
he had tremendous following particularly as a violinist.

BD: How are
performers doing these
days — are they getting better and better as we
go along?

DD: Oh,
they’re better than ever at the Juilliard
School. I can’t believe it sometimes! Right now they’re
preparing the concert of my orchestral music that Gerard
Schwarz will be conducting for my seventy-fifth birthday at Avery
Fischer Hall on November 14th. It’s
sponsored by Juilliard and we had to choose, because everything is
by competition to play with orchestra. We had the competition
for my Kaddish for Cello and
Orchestra. I listened to seven of
them and I found out later two were students of Zara Nelsova and three
were former students of Leonard Rose. They were
magnificent. Dorothy DeLay produces incredible creatures like
Midori
and all the other wonderful young violinists that she has coming
out. Performers are better, technically,
than ever.

BD: They are
better technically, that’s
true. Are they better musically?

DD: That we
will have to wait and see, because if a
Gerard Schwarz could have been one of the great trumpet players and
first trumpet of the New York Philharmonic for years who turns out to
be
one of the greatest conductors later on, that tells us something,
too. So we must wait for the younger ones to develop.
Gerard Schwarz has an orchestra now in Seattle that I would
say is almost as good at the Chicago Symphony. He’s ready to
bring them into New York. Listen to the recording of my
Fourth and Second Symphonies. You’d
think this was the old Boston
Symphony.

BD: I assume,
then, that you are extremely
pleased with these new recordings that are coming out?

DD: I’m more
than pleased. There
isn’t one bad review. Chicago, for example, had one of the
most wonderful reviews of it.

BD: Do you
feel that making these
recordings of your works inhibits other interpretations of them?

DD: I don’t
think so, no. As a matter of
fact, Schwarz asked to hear the old Koussevitzky performance of the Second that was
taken off the air in ‘44 at the premiere, and it is, indeed,
very different from what Schwarz does. But I love what Schwarz
does in his way because
he gives a vitality to the last movement which Koussevitzky, as a
seventy year-old man, could not quite do. On the other hand,
Leonard
Bernstein recorded and played often the Fourth Symphony, and I was never
really happy with
his way. We would talk about why I didn’t like it, and
he said, “Well, I’ll try to do it as close as you want it.” This
is way back in 1948, and he said, “I’ll do my best, but I have a
feeling I want to slow it up a little bit here,” and I said, “Well,
please don’t. You didn’t write it. Do what I say.” He
said, “But I don’t feel it that way.” Already then he had very
strong convictions about what he felt in terms
of interpretation. So now I’m finally hearing the recording of
Schwarz’s, which is the way I want it, not the way Bernstein wanted it.

BD: Who’s right?

DD: Schwarz.

BD: How much
flexibility do you allow
or do you want in terms of interpretation in your scores?

DD: As much
as the conductor wants. For
example, Michael Morgan is performing the Fifth Symphony, which
Bernstein gave the premiere of. Now, that symphony Bernstein did
very well, and there isn’t much leeway and monkeying around with
tempi. So whenever I would find that Bernstein was at the
premiere in ’66, doing something again that was getting in the way of
the piece moving at that point, I would tell him, “Please. You’re
holding it back.” “But I feel it!” By then there was
absolutely nothing you could do. He was on his own track, and you
couldn’t get him to, but by God, came the performance and he did it my
way. So, it was really wonderful that I have a memory of that
wonderful, as I have of other performances — the Eighth Symphony, the
Second Symphony. But I think Schwarz is the one who seems to
have a real affinity for my music. He doesn’t like when
I say it, but I always say, “You are my musical savior.” He
said, “I know, but I’m not on a cross.” [Both laugh]

BD: Hopefully
he’ll be doing lots more
conducting of all of your symphonies. How many are you up to
now — nine or ten?

DD: Eleven.

BD: Is there
a twelfth coming?

DD: No.
I’m just finishing the eleventh now.

BD: May look
ahead?

DD: Oh,
no. I’ve got to orchestrate a whole
opera with Christopher Keene, who’s planning to give in New York with
the City Opera, so I’m afraid that’s going to be it. [See my Interview with
Christopher Keene.]

BD: Which
opera is this?

DD: This is
an opera which takes place in
present day Washington shortly after war called The Noblest Game,
which I wrote for the National Opera Institute. But our strange
managers, a certain woman named Beverly Sills and a certain person
named Julius Rudel, threw screws in the works, so only now that
Christopher Keene is there can he unscrew their screwing it up.
[See my Interview with
Julius Rudel.]

BD:
Has the date for the premiere been set?

DD:
Christopher Keene’s here right now
rehearsing an Argento opera. What he’s doing is trying
to cast my piece, to get an idea because we need a soprano with an
enormous
range — high C sharps and good strong, solid bottoms.

I listened
to Marilyn Zschau last night in Fanciulla.
[See my Interview with
Marilyn Zschau.] She could be, but
she’s a little wobbly on high notes so I’m not sure she’s right.
But right now he wants to get the casting set, and I have to finish up
this symphony for the New York Philharmonic, which is a good year’s
work, and finish the Tenth
for Schwarz for Seattle. So I’m begging to
put it off for about three years because the orchestration alone would
be close to a year. When he’s got casting, then he’ll give me
an approximation of a date.

BD: It’s a
full evening, a full-length opera?

DD: Its
playing time is two hours and twenty-eight
minutes, as I conducted it through. With an intermission it’ll be
probably around two hours and forty-five minutes.BD: Tell me
the particular joys
and sorrows of writing for the human voice.

DD: I’ve
written over a hundred and
something songs, and lots of them have gone into singers’
repertoire. I always feel comfortable with the voice, and it’s
always wonderful when you find the right poetry to write songs.
But I
haven’t been able to do too many of them because as I got older and
older, I found it takes longer and longer to write music. You
develop physical ailments and your eyes get bad and it just takes
longer. The physical labor is horrendous! It’s tough going.

BD: I assume,
though, that the ideas still flow?

DD: The ideas
are faster than ever. What I have
to do is try to put the damper on. There are so many ideas and
it exhausts me, so I sometimes overwork and pay a bad price for it.

BD: Is
composing fun?

DD: [With a
resigned tone] No. It’s agony.

BD: Is it
worth it???

DD:
Yes! If you can get performances like the one I’m
getting here, and if you can have a man like Bernstein perform your
music, and all the other great conductors who’ve performed my
music — Mitropoulos, Monteux, Stokowski, all of them — then it’s worth
the agony.

BD: Are you
optimistic about the future of music?

DD: Oh,
very. There are so many wonderful talents in music, so
many great performers, so many orchestras, so
many wonderful chamber groups and so many people who love music!
There are more than ever. My only worry is TV — and yet I
shouldn’t worry because people are catching on to
how bad TV really is, and that the only good things are the Public
Broadcasting programs. I must say, sometimes I watch TV and I
wonder how in God’s name the American public just doesn’t rise up and
rebel. It’s so ghastly, and you can’t
remember one actress or one actor from another. There are no
faces
I’ve seen where I truly can say, “Yes, these are young
people that have faces as well as great talent,” as the old great star
system of Hollywood used to be with a great Garbo or a great
Dietrich. We had great, great,
wonderful, spiritual faces like Garbo. Who can ever, ever forget
that woman? Even now, one watches Camille and you’re a wreck at
the end of that picture. But now you have absolutely
nothing.
You can’t remember who they are; they all look alike. They
all have fixed noses, and they all have teeth that are fixed.
They’re like Andy Warhol silkscreen people. I must say the
only pleasure I’ve had is because David Lynch is an extraordinary
talent. I watch Twin Peaks
not so much because I think I
know who the murderer is, but because I think the actors are
so fascinating. I think every one of those women are the old
silent movie type faces. You can’t get them out of your
mind! Each one is so different from the other.

BD: You’ve
touched one of my buttons — I love
silent movies!

DD: Well, of
course!

BD: To me
there’s a certain innocence and
naïveté, and a genuineness about the techniques of
film-making back then.

DD: I never
thought it was naïve. I
certainly thought of Josef Sternberg as anything but naïve in
Blue Angel or Clarence Brown
in Intruder in the Dust.
That’s not
very naïve. You have to have great directors. There
were some sort of naïve approaches to what were so-called family
pictures like the Andy Hardy series with Mickey
Rooney when he was a little kid, and all that stuff that Mr. Mayer
insisted on. But no, I don’t think there was much
naïveté. In Rochester, where I live, we have Eastman
House, where the big collection of silent films is. So I see them
all the time and they’re really
quite extraordinary to see today. They had a series of them years
ago. At least in Rochester, if you wait
up until eleven o’clock you might get some really old, good ones of
Marlene Dietrich, like Dishonored
and Morocco, pictures that
you can’t really get on videotapes yet.

BD: Thank you
for being a composer.

DD: Well,
thank you very much for listening to me.

BD: [Laughs]
I wish you lots of success with this and
lots of continued success with all of the old music and the new music
to
come.

DD; Thank you
very, very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

David Diamond was born on July 9, 1915, in Rochester, New York. He
received his first formal training at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
In 1930 he continued his studies at the Eastman School with Bernard
Rogers in composition and Effie Knauss in violin. In the fall of 1934
he went to New York on a scholarship from the New Music School and
Dalcroze Institute, studying with Paul Boepple and Roger Sessions until
the spring of 1936. That summer, Diamond was commissioned to compose
the music for the ballet TOM to a scenario by E.E. Cummings based on
"Uncle Tom's Cabin." Leonide Massine, the choreographer for the ballet,
lived near Paris, and Diamond was sent there to be near him. Although,
due to financial problems, the work was never performed, Diamond did
establish contacts in Paris with Darius Milhaud, Albert Roussel, and
the composer he revered above all others, Maurice Ravel. (The First
Orchestral Suite from the ballet TOM received its much belated and much
acclaimed premiere in 1985, conducted by Gerard Schwarz).

On his second visit to Paris in 1937, Diamond joined the class of Nadia
Boulanger at Fontainebleau. He was introduced to Igor Stravinsky, who
listened to a four-hand piano version of Diamond's just-written Psalm
for orchestra. With a few revisions based on Stravinsky's appraisal,
Psalm won the 1937 Juilliard Publication Award, and was among the
compositions influencing his receipt of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1938.

After the San Francisco premiere of Psalm under Pierre Monteux, Alfred
Frankenstein wrote: "On first hearing, the outstanding qualities of
this work seem to be its fine, granitic seriousness, its significant
compression of a large idea into a small space, and its spare, telling
use of the large orchestra."

Upon Ravel's death in 1937, Diamond wrote an Elegy for brass,
percussion and harps (later arranged for strings and percussion),
dedicated to the memory of the composer who had been his ideal. Diamond
spent 1938-39 in Paris on his Guggenheim Fellowship. He returned to the
United States when Germany declared war on France, and the problems of
day-to-day existence in America soon replaced the charmed life of the
gifted young composer in France. He worked as a night clerk at a soda
counter in New York City, and after resuming violin practice, did a two
year stint in the "Hit Parade" radio orchestra.

An impressive number of awards and commissions during the 1940s
somewhat relieved Diamond's struggle for daily needs. Among the awards
was a renewal of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Prix de Rome, a
personal commission from Dimitri Mitropoulos (resulting in the popular
Rounds for string orchestra), a commission from the Koussevitzky
Foundation for his Symphony No. 4, and a National Academy of Arts and
Letters Grant "in recognition of his outstanding gift among the
youngest generation of composers, and for the high quality of his
achievement as demonstrated in orchestral works, chamber music, and
songs."

Important works appearing during the 1940s include the Concerto for Two
Solo Pianos (1942), String Quartet No. 2 (1943), Symphony No. 3 (1945),
String Quartet No. 3 (1946, receiving the 1947 New York Music Critics'
Circle Award), Sonata for Piano (1947) and Chaconne for Violin and
Piano (1948). In the 1950s Diamond's music became imbued with a much
more chromatic texture. A good example of this new chromaticism is The
World of Paul Klee, four scenes inspired by paintings of the Swiss
artist. Irving Kolodin praised Diamond's "orchestral concept, his
refinement of touch, and power of imagery" in this work. The String
Quartet No. 4, written in 1951, was nominated for a Grammy award in
1965, as recorded on Epic Records by the Beaux Arts Quartet. Alfred
Frankenstein called the work "one of the masterpieces of modern
American chamber music.... The fugal movement provides one of the most
moving experiences to be found in the whole range of modern American
music, but the entire work is an achievement of the rarest quality."

In 1951 Diamond returned to Europe as Fulbright Professor. Peermusic
signed him to an exclusive contract in 1952, which enabled him to
remain in Europe, eventually settling in Florence, Italy. Except for
brief visits to the United States, such as the occasion of his
appointment as Slee Professor at the University of Buffalo in 1961 and
again in 1963, he remained in Italy until 1965, when he returned to the
United States.

On his return, Diamond was greeted by a series of concerts around the
country commemorating his fiftieth birthday. The New York Philharmonic
performed two of his major orchestral works, the Symphony No. 5, with
Leonard Bernstein conducting, and the Piano Concerto, conducted by Mr.
Diamond himself. Harriet Johnson wrote of the fifth symphony that "its
rich texture, glowing from an expansive imagination, soars with a
pulsation that is improvisatory but at the same time the essence of
formal logic and economy of structure." Leonard Bernstein was even more
enthusiastic, finding the fifth symphony "his finest and most
concentrated symphonic work to date. But even more important, I find it
to be a work that revives one's hopes for the symphonic form."
Bernstein praised the "seriousness, intelligence, weight, deftness,
technical mastery, and sheer abundance" of Diamond's music, calling him
"a vital branch in the stream of American Music."

From 1965 to 1967 Diamond taught at the Manhattan School of Music.
During these two years he was the recipient of several awards, among
them the Rheta Sosland Chamber Music prize for his String Quartet No.
8, the Stravinsky ASCAP award, and election to the National Institute
of Arts and Letters. In 1971, Diamond was given a National Opera
Institute Grant to write his opera The Noblest Game. With a libretto by
Katie Louchheim, The Noblest Game is the story of social intrigue in
the Washington DC power set, taking place in the present, "after the
termination of a recent war."

Any portrait of David Diamond would not be complete without mention of
his vocal music. Diamond's songs for voice and piano are among his
finest achievements, sung by the likes of Jennie Tourel, Eileen
Farrell, and Eleanor Steber. Hans Nathan has stated that "David Diamond
has cultivated the art-song more consistently than any other American
composer of his stature. Each of his songs is constructed with the same
detailed care that is ordinarily given to an instrumental work."

Diamond became professor of composition at The Juilliard School in
1973, where he taught well into the 1990s. The renewed interest in
Diamond's music starting in the 1980s coincided with his being awarded
some of the most significant honors available to a composer. In 1986,
Diamond received the William Schuman Lifetime Achievement Award. In
1991 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters and the Edward MacDowell Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement.
Then, in 1995, he was a recipient of the National Medal of Arts in a
ceremony at the White House.

This period culminates in his largest symphony to date. The Symphony
No. 11 (1989-91) was one of a few major works commissioned by the New
York Philharmonic in celebration of its 150th anniversary. In his New
York Times review, Alex Ross wrote that "the confidence and conviction
of the voice are unmistakable" -- a phrase that applies to so much of
Diamond's music written over a remarkable sixty year career.

For more information about David Diamond's life and music, please visit
David Diamond.org

This was my second interview with David Diamond. The
first was done on the telephone in April of 1986. This second
interview, which is presented on this page, was recorded in his hotel
in
Chicago on October 18, 1990. Portions (along with recordings)
were used on WNIB in 1995 and 2000, on WNUR in 2005 and 2009, and on
Contemporary Classical Internet Radio in 2006 and 2010. The
transcription was made and posted on this
website early in 2013. As with all my posted interviews, it
differs slightly from the original, having been edited to read smoothly
and to tighten where needed. I mention this because unbeknownst
to me until I stumbled upon it during a Google search, audio of the
copy I sent to Diamond at his request has appeared on YouTube.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been
transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

Award
- winning
broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago
from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of
2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and
journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM,
as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

You are invited to visit his website
for more information about his work, including selected transcripts of
other interviews, plus a full list of his guests. He would also
like
to call your attention to the photos and information about his
grandfather, who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a
century ago. You may also send him E-Mail
with comments, questions and suggestions.